AI has arrived, and it's not just making headlines – it's also taking readers. World History Encyclopedia CEO Jan van der Crabben knew this day would come when his website showed up in Google's AI Overviews, alongside other history sites.
His site built a massive audience with the help of Google, which still accounts for 80% of its traffic. But as AI search and bots like ChatGPT ingest and summarize the web's content, that traffic is starting to disappear. Van der Crabben, the website's CEO and founder, knew he was getting a preview of what many online publishers may soon experience.
"There used to be this implicit agreement between publishers and Google that basically, Google could scrape, analyze, process, and do whatever they wanted with publishers' content and in return, they would send traffic to the publishers, send them readers," Van der Crabben told me. "Now, this unspoken contract is kind of breaking."
World History Encyclopedia is just one site, but Van der Crabben's anecdote is just one story. The migration of readers from the web to AI summaries will likely continue.
The internet has always favored ease. And using generative AI to find the most valuable parts of the web's evergreen content – like recipes, personal finance, and history content – can be a better experience than poking through sites one by one. Along the way, these systems will likely rewrite the economics of the web, and perhaps reshape the internet itself.
Though a non-profit, World History Encyclopedia sustains itself largely through advertising, which makes up 70% of its revenue. It employs nine people, publishes approximately ten articles per week, and translates its content into 40+ languages.
To run this operation, it places ads next to its articles and depends on search to bring visitors to its pages. As traffic drops, so does revenue, and that throws the site's ability to keep churning out history articles into question.
"In service, the only outcome that matters is resolution. Your customers do not care how many steps you eliminated; they care about one thing: did you resolve my problem or find an opportunity to assist me quickly and effectively?" Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier announced the company's new Zendesk Resolution Platform will help companies build AI customer service agents and charge based on resolution, not volume.
Eggemeier stopped by my YouTube page this week to talk about AI's role in customer service. Alibaba chair Joe Tsai thinks there may be a "AI data center bubble" [Bloomberg]. CoreWeave violated the terms of a $7.6B loan from BlackStone [Financial Times]. ChatGPT-4o’s Studio Ghibli-esque characters prompt copyright concerns [Tech Crunch]. SoftBank and OpenAI are finalizing a world record-breaking $40 billion funding round [Bloomberg].
Judge blocks injunction from record labels suing Anthropic over copyright infringement [WSJ]. Many Chinese AI data centers are sitting unused [MIT].
This Week On Big Technology Podcast: AI's Rising Risks: Hacking, Virology, Loss of Control – With Dan Hendrycks Dan Hendrycks is the director and co-founder of the Center for AI Safety, and an advisor to Scale AI and xAI. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a discussion of AI's growing risk profile, and what to do about it. Tune in to hear Hendricks explain why virology expertise in AI models is an immediate concern and how these systems might soon enable devastating hacks.
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